Current approaches for obtaining the largest format detector arrays for frequency-modulated laser detection and ranging have involved increasing the number, size and/or complexity of amplifiers, analog-to-digital converters, and memories associated with the pixels of an array of high-bandwidth detectors. High digitization rates and the resulting large volumes of data that must be sent to a processor to compute the amplitude and phase of the return signal have limited array sizes and effectively precluded real-time operation.
There is, therefore, a need in the art for improved capture and handling of data employed for coherent laser detection and ranging.